Intel quietly launches 14nm Braswell, Bay Trail’s successor

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Intel has quietly launched its first 14nm Braswell cores this week. These new 14nm chips are the successor to Intel’s 22nm Bay Trail-D (meaning the Celeron / Pentium flavor of Bay Trail) and will target ultra-mobile systems and low-end desktop PCs. Just as Broadwell is a die-shrink of Haswell, Braswell is Bay Trail’s die shrink — which means the 14nm “Airmont” CPU core inside the SoC isn’t expected to offer dramatically new features or other capabilities compared with its predecessor. Increased efficiency, lower TDPs, and better thermals are the order of the day. Intel’s Cherry Trail, which will debut later this year, will offer the same silicon in a tablet power envelope.

According to CPU-World, the new chips will ship in 2-4 core configurations. The big change to Braswell is the inclusion of Generation 8 graphics support. Its Bay Trail predecessor’s GPU technology was derived from Ivy Bridge at a time when Haswell was already shipping. This means that Braswell skipped the Haswell graphics generation altogether — Intel has effectively standardized its graphics capabilities between its Atom and Core product families.

The image above is for a full implementation of Generation 8 graphics, like what the Core M family carries. We know that one difference between Braswell and the Core family is that Braswell has a maximum of 16 EUs — not 24. It’s logical to assume that the overall implementation is smaller and less powerful, possibly with less cache resources compared with its bigger cousin. The gain over older, Bay Trail-based Atoms, however, should still be significant.

So how does this compare against Intel’s current line-up? Let’s use the Bay Trail-based Celeron N2940 as a point of comparison. That chip is a quad-core CPU with a base clock at 1.83GHz with a burst frequency of 2.25GHz, support for DDR3L-1333, Intel HD Graphics (Bay Trail had 4 Ivy Bridge-class EUs), and a maximum graphics clock speed of 854MHz. TDP is 7.5W.

The new Braswell-based N3150 is a touch slower on the CPU side, at 1.6GHz / 2.08GHz, but offers faster RAM, significantly improved graphics hardware (ameliorated somewhat by lower base and turbo clocks on the GPU side) and a 6W TDP. That’s a 20% reduction on Bay Trail’s previous — we picked chips at the top of Intel’s TDP range because the high-end cores are the most likely to hit those figures. 1.5W may not sound like much, but in a 30Whr battery that’s the difference between four and five hours of runtime.

Right now, Braswell looks like a credible Bay Trail follow-up that maintains the same sort of power-consumption progression in budget markets that Core M and the mobile Core i5/i7 processors offer to higher-end customers. The consumer laptop market is generally split into three categories: Low-cost thin-and-light systems (the successors to original netbooks, like the Asus T100 Bay Trail-based TransformerBook); inexpensive full-sized laptops that weigh 4-5 pounds with lower resolution screens, but a fair amount of processing power; and high-end ultrabooks with mediocre CPU performance, but high-resolution displays and a target weight of 2-3.5 pounds. Braswell will anchor this first segment, mobile Broadwell hits the seconds, and the already-launched Core M (alongside higher-end mobile Broadwell cores) will take care of the third.

Intel has told us that it expects Braswell will be available in systems by the back-to-school time this year, which means netbooks and notebooks in that time frame should get a nice battery-life bump.

Phi has no real power concernsyet, but would be nice. Guess about 3 Tocks away… On a side note author hilariously says battery life bump by back 2 school. That will get chewed up like the phone/tablet market. Ridiculous screens and other needless tech to eat aka negate the battery savings.
Intel finally looks ready for the mobile space! I wander what pricing is looking like. Fierce competition already and AMD sitting on fence too…. I am amazed I can still be surprised…

BtotheT

Media players, corporate thin clients, tablets/chrome/netbooks/micro pcs. I need to time travel to Q1 2016, let me know if you find a way.

Ha. I’d just be afraid of the freezing/thawing mechanism’s interaction with the cell wall.
I feel like you’d need a grid of coils/beams through you to hyperfreeze/thaw.

Sidenote; a friend of mine once put goldfish in a half-full bottle of water then put it in my freezer(on it’s side). I discovered it 2 days later and filled it with near boiling water then near immediately poured it into a luke warm sink full of water, of the 8 baby goldfish 5 started swimming, 2 of those 5 bumping the sink’s walls as if blind, 3 quite regular, and 3 belly up. Was pretty interesting, though cruel but not on my account.

I grew up as a kid in the middle of the woods in South Mississippi, in a house trailer, with no other homes within a few miles. To make it all worse, we didn’t have satellite TV, Internet, and my only game console was an old NES with Super Mario Brothers, Duck Hunt and that really annoying boxing game. Needless to say, I had to come up with creative ways to entertain myself and during the spring, this consisted of catching lizards and raising them in old aquariums.

I would go around our land and find the common garden lizards (these guys: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_anole) that would hang out in my dad’s gardens and my mom’s flower beds and put them in aquariums. Feeding them wasn’t hard, since houseflies seemed to love our home.

I had about five or six lizards at once for all of my post- 2nd grade Summer, but as Fall came around, I noticed that they had all stopped eating, or moving for that matter. Being a little kid, I immediately made the assumption that they were dead, put them in an old moonshine jug, and buried them in the back yard under a wooden cross that I nailed together with two branches.

That winter passed and I forgot about my lost pets, but as Spring came back around, my dad decided that the ground where his corn was growing had been expended and that Nitic Oxide and other expensive fertilizers wouldn’t do the job. Instead, we decided to just move the garden.

The new spot that he picked was right over where I had buried my pets the previous year. He, being the kind of father that he was, “politely” ordered me to dig up “those damn lizards” and throw them away. Saddened, I grabbed a garden spade and uncovered their shallow glass coffin.

To my surprise, when I pulled up the old moonshine jar all of the old lizards were still alive (if not a bit pissed off). Apparently, the cold Winter ground had slowed their metabolisms to the point that they were able to survive the short Mississippi winter and they sprung back to life as they warmed up. I let them go and never caught another lizard again- it just never felt right afterwards.

I guess a complete freezing isn’t necessary to keep something in a state of suspension. If it’s cold blooded, you can just lower the temperature to the point where everything just slows down and doesn’t die. Too bad we ended up as mammals…

BtotheT

Yeah, a reptilian/insect race would work well in that fashion, mammals hybernate as well though but for extended(over a decade) periods you pretty much have to become a popsickle. There are many whom can slow their metabolism and resting heart rate on command. Edgar allen Poe for example was mentioned as displaying this, I can to a small degree by letting everything ‘idle’, sadly it can’t ward off decay long term. Making better vessels made preempt freezing our consciousness though. Not to go out on a limb but it’s been said synthetic tissued scouts with autonomic food retrieval with automated production have made journeys over lightyears.. Yep I’m talkin ETs, low IQ feedback synchronized portable observers for long range timely deployments. We do this ourselves with drones and bomb diffusers, a little AI to lose the remote control and yep..

I think we could make a long-term journey as AIs, but this universe won’t last forever. We may be able to populate distant star systems in the future by hybernating long enough, but those pesky emotions get in the way. It actually has a deep detrimental effect on a person to know that their home that they once knew is now gone, even if they’re waking up in a different star system with a new future ahead of them.

Those drones you mentioned aren’t too advanced, though. I’m only a military engineer (construction worker), but being in the military has given me the chance to talk to some pretty incredible people. One of those was a drone operator who has a collection of videos on his work computer of feeds from drones that lost connection to the satellite and just smashed into a mountain because they couldn’t navigate around it.

deathmaster

Another nail in the coffin Named AMD Oh YEAH!!!!!!

torjs99

can’t see why that would make you happy? do you enjoy paying more?

deathmaster

And you can’t see the bigger picture. We wouldn’t be paying more because of ARM. The High-end as we know it IS ALREADY DEAD!!!! The PC Space is changing and for the better to low power cheap devices.

statisticly cheap = crap, no one wants low performance garbage, if they did why would higher end stuff sell at all?

deathmaster

Cheap Notebooks here we come YEAH!!!!

Chandler Keith Henson

crap computers that break down faster and have even worse performance after a year, just what we need

torjs99

4W! amazing

Marc GP

It’s fun to see Intel in this place, they fidget between improving their low-end to keep at bay ARM high-end systems, but they don’t want to make them powerful enough to steal sales of their own high-end processors. XD

Thanks ARM, welcome competence.

zakius

right, braswell is just sandy bridge but with… 10% of sandys TDP! they simply cannot push them over 2.something GHz without increasing price by few hundreds percent
or
it’s not THAT simple, probably atoms architecture isn’t that easy to push higher, also as they are tiny it would be hard to get all that heat from them (let’s be honest, at 4.5 it wouldn’t be 6W anymore, right?)

but still, braswells are great things to keep your device up and running few hours longer (if you turn off the screen…) at cost of few percent power less, seems reasonable, especially when you look at core m prices

AA

Finally intel low end is having some decent improvements, intel baytrail igp was a joke

mrw55

I came on here to post regarding the PC deals I’m seeing on line and a maybe correlation between this article and the inexpensive bargains I see advertised on Newegg, etc. However, this doesn’t explain the same deals I’m seeing for PCs with higher-end processors.

Anyone have a clue why the market is begging people to purchase/upgrade PC systems?

Is it the move to portables with some of the market, overproduction for current market of PC sales, or what? I see just as many article predicting the death of the PC as I see stating the PC isn’t going anywhere. What gives?

CB1138

These are good questions, and the answers will say much about how Intel and other stocks will fare in the near to medium term.

warcaster

$161 for a crappy mobile Atom chip? Are you freaking kidding me? A $30 ARM chip beats that chip.

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